Thursday, January 7, 2016

Rahm Emanuel/Rudi Giuliani

Deep dish pizza hails from Chicago. And Chicago is a deep
dish place with regard to politics as well as cheese, toppings, and crust. If
you've been reading Rick
Perlstein in the New Yorker** on the police killing of Laquan
McDonald and what looks like thecover-up Mayor Rahm Emmanuel can't quite cover-up, then you
know how deep dish Chicago this story is, how suffused with the city's history.

One can get lost in the Chicago-ness of it all. I'm not,
like Saul Bellow's Augie March, Chicago born. When I visited, which was rarely,
it was mostly to join in demonstrations against the War in Vietnam. And I
recall how at one admittedly ill-advised expression of anti-war bravado,
Chicago's finest said fuck it, fuck tear gas, batons and busting heads; let us
draw our fine service revolvers and start firing. Which they did.

So I have some appreciation of how it can quickly get to be
when you step out of line in Chicago. Even if you are white. Even if all you want
to do is peacefully — or, in this case, to be honest, quasi-peacefully —
protest against the War in Vietnam.

Still, it's not just a Chicago story. Specifically, very
much the same deep dish of mayoral cover-up and murderous police conduct was
served out under the Giuliani administration in New York.

Lots of thick pizza there.

Rahm Emmanuel isn't going anywhere.

Rudi Giuliani, not deterred by his role in police murder,
tried to run for president.